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Indepth Arts News:
"Pieter Boel, Painter of Louis XIV's Animals - The collection of painted studies from
the Gobelins"
2001-09-12 until 2001-12-17
Louvre Museum
Paris, ,
FR
Painter and drawer of animals for Louis
XIV, Pieter Boel was said to have been the
student of the great painter of still life
paintings and animals Jan Fyt, from Anvers
like him. Familiarised with Castiglione' s
works during his journey to Genes from
1647 to 1649, the artist joins, from 1668
onwards, the painters, most of them
Flemish, who work under the supervision
of Charles Le Brun.
Since more than a
century onwards, Pieter Boel' s studies,
there are 80 of them, have been dispersed
between the Louvre and other different
French Museum and are reunited for the
exhibition. They are part of some paintings
from Louis XIV' s collection and were for a
very long time ascribed to the painter
François Desportes. The studies were
meant to be used as models for animals,
which appear in the foreground of the
tapestries of the prestigious hanging from
Mois or Royal Mansions. Current archive
discoveries show exactly the road these
works have made from the Goblins to the
Louvre and support fully their reattribution
to Pieter Boel. This exhibition will enable
visitors to appreciate Pieter Boel' s
originality and virtuosity, who appears,
through his paintings brushed in a spirited
way, being a wonderful observer of the
nature, moreover of lively nature, because
he was inspired by birds and mammals he
was able to observe in the Versailles
Menagerie, which was newly settled, and
not dead animals, like it is often the case for
artists at that time. One will appreciate the
painted structures by Boel on a same
canvas, with details of the animal, seen
under different views, and also the quasi
tactile rendering of fur or feathers of his
models, which seem very natural, on the
opposite of stuffed animals, around which
an artist may only turn. It is one reason
why these drawings, very lively, were so
loved by French artists, like Desportes,
already quoted but also Oudry and
Chardin.
IMAGE
Pieter Boel
1624 - 1674
Double study of a head of dromedary
musée du Louvre
inv 3987
Copyright RMN/Gérard Blot
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